Wireless communications has entered a period of explosive growth of data services, and an operator faces the pressure of both “providing a higher network capacity” and “reducing transmission costs per bit”. A heterogeneous network (Hetnet) is a network made up of cells of different sizes and different types, such as a macro cell, a micro cell, a pico cell, a femto cell, and a cell in a form of remote radio. By deploying a macro cell and a micro-type cell, ten times as many as a system capacity can be provided for an area with dense traffic. In an inter-frequency heterogeneous network, by deploying a small quantity of inter-frequency micro cells, considerable capacity and throughput gains can be obtained, and there is no interference problem compared with an intra-frequency deployment scenario.
In the prior art, in an inter-frequency heterogeneous network, for user equipment (UE) that depends on an inter-frequency compressed mode for inter-frequency measurement, a compressed mode may be enabled to perform measurement, to discover an inter-frequency neighboring cell; after discovering that the UE is in proximity to a micro cell, the UE reports the discovery to a network side, the network side then delivers a list of inter-frequency micro cells and a configuration of the inter-frequency compressed mode to the UE, and the UE measures the inter-frequency micro cells according to the list of inter-frequency micro cells and configuration information of the inter-frequency compressed mode.
However, in the foregoing method, the UE needs to always enable the inter-frequency compressed mode to measure an inter-frequency cell, so as to discover that the UE is in proximity to an inter-frequency neighboring cell, which causes that the UE consumes much power and data transmission performance is affected.